Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Argo Blockchain plc post AGM investor Q&A. Throughout this recorded question and answer session, investors online will be in listen-only mode. Questions are, of course, encouraged and can be submitted at any time via the Q&A tab just situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Please just simply type in your question at any time and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question received during the meeting itself, given the attendance on today's call. However, the company will review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. As usual, we'd like to submit the following poll, and I'm sure the company would be most grateful for your participation. I'd now like to hand over to Peter Wall, CEO. Good afternoon, sir. Thank you, Mark. Welcome everyone. Before I give a few opening remarks, I just wanna welcome as well on the call with me, we have Alex Appleton, our CFO, who's in London. We've got Tom Divine, who's our VP of Investor Relations, and Tom is in Houston. I think as everyone knows, we held our AGM this morning, and that was held at an office in London. We had about 100 virtual attendees as well. The results of the AGM was that all of the resolutions that were put forth by the company have passed. We're pleased about that. Thank you for those of you that got out and voted, we really appreciate the support. As we've done in the past, we hold this Q&A for shareholders post AGM. We have it at 11 A.M. Eastern, 4 P.M. U.K. time, 8 A.M. Pacific, so that our shareholders in both the U.K. and the U.S. and Canada are able to to join. We've had a number of questions that have been pre-submitted through the Investor Meet platform. Tom has been gathering those. We're gonna start with answering those, and then you can also submit questions through the chat function in the Investor Meet platform on your browser. One thing to note is that our interims our interim results are gonna come out in the next couple of months. We'll have detailed numbers so far about the first half of the year at that point. Obviously a more fulsome update on all the company's activities. We did receive some specific questions having to do with the financials for the first half of the year. Some of those we can answer if we've disclosed them in any of our operational updates or in our Q1 earnings update, which was not that long ago. We did that in May. Some of those are gonna have to wait until we have the interims that come out in a couple of months. All right. That's the intro from me. Again, thanks for joining. I'm gonna hand it over to Tom, and Tom's gonna walk us through some of the questions that have come in. Yeah. Thanks, Peter. We got several pre-submitted questions over the past couple of days, and understandably, a lot of them have had to do with the price of Bitcoin and the general market environment. Some examples of those questions include, you know: What does the recent drop in Bitcoin price mean for Argo's ongoing viability? How low can Bitcoin prices go and Argo remain profitable? And what happens if Bitcoin prices drop to, you know, 10,000-12,000 per Bitcoin? Peter, can you give us your thoughts on the current market environment and what it means for Argo? Sure. Thanks, Tom. Obviously some good questions, some very relevant questions. You know, to start with, obviously, we always wanna see Bitcoin as high as possible. That being said, as one of the longer tenured, you know, mining companies, we've been through this before. We've been through bear markets before. I've been using the term muscle memory a lot, which we have from those experiences. You know, myself and Sebastian and Perry call on that muscle memory back from 2018, 2019, certainly the first half of 2020. This feels similar in many ways, you know. This also feels different, this particular bear market that we're in, because I think at this particular moment in the history of crypto and the history of Bitcoin, there's a lot more going on. There's a lot more institutional support. There's institutional investors. There's a large retail investor following that has a long-term belief in this space. There's investment banks, there's lending institutions. All of these types of support and, members of the ecosystem really didn't exist before. They didn't exist in the last bear market. My feeling, and I think the company's feeling, is that all of that kind of, support really feels like, it means that this sector, of the economy, of the future, you know, financial system is not gonna go away anytime soon. That is different than 2019, 2020 when, 2018 when, you know, Bitcoin spiked and then came down. There was a feeling like, you know, is Bitcoin ever gonna recover? This doesn't feel like that. This feels like, you know, those of us that are in this space have an extreme amount of confidence that in the long term, you know, this asset class, in particular Bitcoin, is gonna continue to appreciate. We're long-term bullish, and the short term, there's gonna be some volatility, and we're in that right now, and it never feels good. But we know or we believe that in the long term, things are gonna work out you know, in the right direction for this particular industry. Certainly that's been true when you zoom out and look at the last 10 years, last 12 years in the history of Bitcoin. In terms of the particular macro environment situation, obviously, that's also different this time around. You know, in 2018, 2019, 2020, the macro environment was pretty good. Now we've got a risk-off environment. Bitcoin is acting more like a tech stock. In fact, it's down less than a lot of other tech stocks. So it shouldn't be that surprising that, you know, in a risk-off environment, a newer asset class that is seen as a higher risk asset class like Bitcoin or like crypto or like miners are gonna have some volatility. In terms of how all of this affects us, similar to again to 2018, 2019 when we went through this before, we focused on execution. Right now we're focusing on executing at Helios. We are very fortunate that we got that facility, you know, funded and started when we did. I think the timing was really good for us. We're now in a place where, you know, we've paid for the vast majority of the Bitmain machines which are coming in and being installed on a weekly basis, on a monthly basis. We'll have an update next week as part of our operational update about where we're at with the installation of those machines and where our hash rate's at and how much we've mined for this month. The good news is that we've paid for over 90% of those machines, you know, those 20,000 machines that we ordered from Bitmain that are being installed. The other good news is that, you know, 95% of the facility is paid for that first 200 MW of phase one. All of which means that, you know, the 3.6 exahash from those 20K machines is on track and is paid for. That's a good thing for us, and our focus really, as I said, is on executing to make sure that, you know, we meet our monthly targets for getting our hash rate up, which ultimately will allow us to mine more Bitcoin. We can't control the price of Bitcoin, but we can control is how many machines we install, and how, you know, much we're able to keep our hash rate online. In terms of other pieces, you know, people ask about, as Tom said, what happens if Bitcoin goes to $10,000-$12,000. Alex is gonna go a little bit more into a bit more detail on this in a minute. Our direct cost of producing a Bitcoin has been around $10,000 so far this year in 2022. In that scenario, if Bitcoin was to drop to that price, it would be close to our, you know, our marginal cost of production. But the thing to remember is that the network is dynamic and to a certain extent, self-regulating. We saw this during the 2020 halving, where the price of Bitcoin, you know, was pretty low at in a halving environment, quite a bit of hash rate came offline. Margins were compressed and then recovered, you know, to a decent effect fairly quickly afterwards because miners that are less efficient than us came offline because people's cost of production was more than their revenue they were getting from Bitcoin. You know, at the level of Bitcoin, you know, if Bitcoin goes to $10,000, we would expect to see a significant reduction in the network hash rate as miners unplug those machines which are essentially no longer economic. On top of that, you know, on top of a kind of a low cost of production, our balance sheet is also strong enough to be able to withstand lower prices and then potentially take advantage of any increased market share that would come with that and then any potential, you know, downturn in the price of machines. We feel like we're in a really good place. You know, as a miner, we feel like we're really well-positioned, and that's a testament to the work that we did in 2021 and to, you know, really kinda over-delivering and under-promising, which has kind of been the theme for us for the first half of this year so far. I'm gonna hand it over to Alex, who's gonna go into a little bit more detail on the numbers. Hi all. Good to speak to you all. Obviously as Peter said, you know, it's not great that BTC prices have come down so much. You know, however, our mining margins, certainly what we presented in, you know, previous investor presentations remains very competitive and deep market leading. You know, we always talk about being in the top tier A of miners and those are the miners who are going to really thrive in the long run. As Peter said, our average direct cost per Bitcoin mined is somewhere around $10,000 over the last few months. That's not our break-even point because of the nature of the algorithm, and Peter touched upon this. You know, as other miners switch off their machines, our percentage of the network increases. Even though the price is coming down, potentially we're mining more Bitcoin, and that is how that algorithm self-regulates. We've seen this before, as Peter said. You know, during the halving, we saw this last year when we saw a decrease around the Chinese mining ban, we saw a decrease in the price of Bitcoin. We also saw a decrease in the network hash rate as those Chinese miners turned their machines off. Actually, if you look at our revenue over the past year, and you can see it from our operational updates, our revenue and our mining margins stayed relatively consistent even through that period, where we saw, you know, hash rate changing quite considerably and also the Bitcoin price changing. Our strong focus on efficiency and we're really building out this focus on efficiency. You know, we're in the final stages of becoming a vertically integrated miner, where we're moving to the owned and operated model. We own our own infrastructure. We are close to our machines. This gives us more control in a bear market. We've talked about the runway before, and Peter's talked about the runway that we have in Texas. You know, we have the ability to control, you know, what we own and how we manage it. We're in a really good place from that point of view. You know, we're also developing proprietary immersion technology and designing custom rigs to use the Intel chips. And we are still, you know, very profitable in terms of mining. We're in that tier A. That's how you should think about this. That's how we think about it, maintaining that economic advantage over our peers, and the mining margins that you see that we can achieve using our own equipment, and from our own facility. We are well-placed. Thank you. Thanks, Alex. Our next topic that we've gotten a few questions on has to do with our outstanding debt and, specifically, the Bitcoin-backed loan that we have with Galaxy. Could you go into a little bit more detail about that and what our strategy is around that loan? As Peter said earlier on in the call, you know, in terms of actual specifics around some of the numbers, you know, we'll be looking to discuss them and disclose them as we bring out our interims. I won't go into actual specifics, but I think the question really comes from what we've seen from some of our peers and what our attitude to risk is and our hedging strategy. The first thing to say is, you know, a hedging strategy is not new to us. We've been having a hedging strategy, be it around, you know, when we were selling Bitcoin and how we sold Bitcoin. We had what was then called the relative exposure strategy. We sold Bitcoin in a controlled fashion, you know, forecasting what our cash flow and fiat requirement was, and then slowly selling off Bitcoin to meet those particular peaks in demand, be that at the end of the month when the power bills were due, et cetera. What that enabled us to do was manage either accelerating, if we saw a spike in Bitcoin price, the sale of Bitcoin, or pulling back if we saw a slump. You know, the last thing you want to be is in a position where you have to sell Bitcoin today to meet a cost from tomorrow. We've always had strategies around, you know, hedging and exposure, et cetera. When we first took on board the Bitcoin-backed loans, you know, about this time last year, a little bit earlier than that last year, you know, we developed our strategy. We've been refining that strategy over certainly over the past sort of 12 months or so. You know, we've had, you know, increase in knowledge in terms of people coming into the business. For example, Seif, the new COO, you know, has brought his his knowledge and experience to bear on that. Actually, you know, yesterday, as recently as yesterday, we hired a new derivatives trader who is gonna really supercharge that strategy and really refine it. In terms of where we are, I'm comfortable with our strategy. I think it's a good one. It's working and, you know, we are making plans just to improve it and to keep on improving it. I might just add one thing, Alex, which is to that, which is, you know, I was at a conference recently and there was lots of talk about hedging, which miners had not necessarily been talking about previously. You know, the hedging production, hedging in general is something that is in the ether in 2022, and certainly wasn't in 2021. As Alex said, we've been going back to 2019, 2020, we've been talking about hedging. We've done various hedges and have continued, you know, with where the market is this year, done some hedging. As Alex said, we're really pleased with where we're at in terms of, you know, the Bitcoin-backed loan hedging in particular, and we'll put more details out about that with the interims. Thanks, Peter and Alex. Alex, kind of continuing on talking about the other outstanding debt. We've gotten a question. Can you just kind of recap the other outstanding debt that we have, outside of the Bitcoin-backed loan? Okay. There are four real streams. There are the Baby Bonds, which we raised on the Nasdaq last November. $40 million worth. I think the interest rate was 8.75%. Earlier this year, we took on the NYDIG infrastructure financing, so that was $27 million worth. Then we also have the NYDIG machine financing. Now that is really a facility of $71 million, which we're drawing down as we're receiving machines that is collateralized against. There is also some small mortgages on the Canadian properties. I think those are the four streams of debt that we have on top of the Bitcoin-backed loan. Great. Thanks, Alex. Peter, the next question is we've got a couple of questions to give an update on both Argo Labs and Pluto. Maybe you can also just real quickly kind of talk about the differences between Argo Labs and Pluto. Sure. Let me start with Argo Labs. Argo Labs is our in-house innovation arm, that is essentially a non-mining division. They are currently managing approximately 10% of our HODL, and using it to participate in various projects within the broader blockchain ecosystem with a specific focus on Web3 projects. In terms of details on our Q1 earnings call, I dug into a little bit of some of the projects that Argo Labs is working on, including a bunch of different token projects, some GameFi, some NFTs. On the participatory side, running nodes, staking, providing some liquidity on various DeFi protocols. I also updated about our exposure to the Terra situation and essentially you know updated the market that or updated shareholders that it wasn't an issue for us and we really didn't have any exposure there. Just in general, we're happy with the work that Argo Labs is doing. It's a long-term play on the ecosystem. You know, we've got a team of about 5 or 6 there and they continue to perform well. We you know are staying the course on Argo Labs. In terms of the difference between Argo Labs and Pluto. Pluto is an outside investment into you know a privately held company. Argo Labs is an internal division. There's some overlap in that they are both involved in, you know, NFTs and GameFi and Web3 projects. Ultimately, you know, they're very different teams doing different things, looking at different projects. In terms of our position on where Pluto's at right now or an update in terms of the overall performance of the team at Pluto, we're an active shareholder of Pluto. We're in regular contact with them, and we're confident in the management team there, and that, you know, in the long term, our investment will be fruitful. Yeah, that's the update for Pluto and Argo Labs. Great. Our next question, Peter, comes from Shagar S.. If you don't raise equity or debt or sell Bitcoin, is your only income stream coming from DeFi? Maybe you can talk about what our financing options are. Sure. Hi, Shagar. I think you dropped that question in the Q&A. We have three levers, and I've talked about this a lot. Some of you are probably tired of hearing about this, the three levers. I know Alex is. One is selling Bitcoin, one is raising debt, and one is raising equity. We've done all three of those at different times in the company's history. 2021, it was really the year of raising equity with a little bit of debt. 2022, so far, the first half of this year has been raising debt, and we've sold some Bitcoin. We've said for the second half of this year, we're gonna continue with the same strategy at about a two-to-one ratio in terms of debt to Bitcoin. Obviously, that depends on where the debt markets are at, whether, you know, we like the deals that are out there. As I said earlier, we don't have a ton of huge costs coming up 'cause the vast majority of our Bitmain machines and our infrastructure are paid for. It's really just the Intel machines that we have some costs coming up on. There's some flexibility there for us to lean in or lean out, depending on, you know, market conditions and the like. In terms of income from DeFi, it's not material for us. It's really those other three levers. That's kinda how we view, you know, being able to pay for both operational expenses and for any CapEx that we have. Alex, you wanna add anything to that? No, I think you pretty much covered it, Peter. I think at the moment it is that debt and selling Bitcoin, and that's the strategy that we're pursuing at the moment. Great. Thanks. Peter, the next question comes from Jason B. It has to do with the resolutions that were passed this morning. Why do you believe resolutions two and nine had 25%-28% votes against, and how are you proposing to address those results? Sure. Thank you, Jason. Yeah, we're very pleased with the outcome of the AGM this morning, as I said. You know, the various resolutions. Resolution nine is a super important one for us. It's our incentive plan to make sure that we can keep our team members, you know, now and into the future, engaged and make sure that they have an option for equity or essentially options as the company grows. And that's really important, obviously for a young company like us to have staff that can grow and be incentivized alongside shareholders. Thank you shareholders that voted in favor of that. You know, in terms of why we didn't get as much of a majority on those than on the other resolutions, one of the proxy advisors recommended against them. There's three main proxy advisors out in the world: Glass Lewis, Egan-Jones, and ISS. Glass Lewis and Egan-Jones voted in or recommended voting in favor of all the resolutions. The ISS didn't. There was some kinda technicalities in the incentive plan that they, you know, thought that we needed to address. It's not unusual for the ISS to recommend voting against various resolutions. Some institutions follow them to the letter, some don't. It really depends on the particular resolution. You know, we're gonna continue to engage with our shareholders to discuss their concerns. We're gonna continue to engage with proxy advisors. I think, you know, as a company, we're still, you know, in the early years. We're still every year improving our ability to engage with, you know, folks like proxy advisors. I feel like, you know, this was a really good outcome for us. It'll, I think, continue to go well in the future for us if we take the same tack that we took this time. Great. Our next question comes from Dave in the U.K. What percentage of Argo is using green energy, and what are the long-term aims of Argo regarding green energy? Sure. Thank you, Dave, in the UK. All of our operations, Dave, in Quebec, get their power from Hydro-Québec, which is 99% renewable. It's hydropower. In Texas, we're plugged into the grid, an interconnection with ERCOT. We're located in an area that has 85% wind power. Any power that we are getting that is not from renewables, we're offsetting with renewable energy credits and verified energy reductions. Last year, we put out our full climate strategy. This year we're gonna put one out again. It's coming out soon, so keep an eye out for it. You'll see kind of the 2021 numbers, you know, kinda where we're at, how we get to carbon neutrality. In fact, we go beyond carbon neutrality. We're climate positive, or carbon negative. We feel good about our approach to sustainability. It's a key part of who we are. It's a key differentiator from other companies. It's a key part of our values and has been since we started mining in Quebec, using hydropower. We're gonna continue to lean into it. Great. Thanks, Peter. Our next question comes from Steven G. Can you comment on whether you are going to convert Canadian shares into Nasdaq shares, and if and when that's scheduled to happen? Sure. Thank you, Steven G. We're not listed in Canada, Steven G. Our primary shares are listed on the LSE, and then we have ADRs listed on the Nasdaq. Yeah, no plans to convert any Canadian shares 'cause we don't have any. Thanks, Peter. Another question from Shagar S.. Do you see any distressed assets for sale in the market? I can't comment on any specifics, but what I can say is generally, you know, I don't think it's a secret that there are miners that have, you know, over-committed to orders and have put down deposits on orders and either don't have a place for those machines or don't have the capital to pay for those machines. In general, in the sector, you know, there's lots of talk about, you know, machines that are becoming available that are less expensive than they were, you know, a few months ago, and certainly significantly less expensive than last year. If that's what you mean, Shigar, by distressed assets, you know, I think there are some. I don't think it's a massive amount, but there's definitely some opportunities out there for lower cost assets than there was, you know, three months, six months, certainly twelve months ago. Thanks, Peter. We have another question coming in, from Gil R. What is your advantage compared to other Bitcoin mining companies? That's a good question. I think we have a couple advantages. I touched on our ESG efforts. I think that's a big part of who we are and is a key differentiator. As Alex mentioned, we are in the upper tier of efficiency for miners in terms of our cost of production, and that's because of our low cost of power in Quebec and our low cost of power in Texas. I would also add that, you know, our experience in mining is at this point a differentiator. We've been mining for four and a half years at scale. Our team is very granular in their ability to control miners, in our ability to, you know, have a really good uptime. I would say that that's a key differentiator for us. Lastly, I think we're an innovative company. You know, we're one of the only four companies working with Intel and producing. We'll be producing machines with you know, a chip coming from Intel in a custom designed rig that we are co-designing with ePIC Blockchain Technologies, who's a Canadian manufacturing company. I think that is you know, no one else is doing that and that's gonna be a key differentiator for us. I would include within the innovation, you know, kind of side of things, Argo Labs as well, which is we are, you know, looking forward into the future at Web3 projects, which we think are gonna be profitable and engaging and important and disruptive. We're learning about them, leaning into them, and ultimately deploying resources into them. I think those are some of the kind of key differentiators for us. I like the position we're in right now. I think we've played it smart in 2021. We didn't over-commit. We're also the captain of our own ship at Helios. You know, we can expand that facility another 600 MW at our own discretion, at our own pace. You know, in a bear market, that's important, that you're not overly committed or under-committed, that you can turn on development relatively quickly. We have that kind of optionality both with Helios and with the Intel rigs that we're producing. Thanks, Peter. We're coming up on the half of the hour, so this will be our last question. Really it's kind of an amalgamation of more operational questions that we've gotten. We've gotten some questions asking for updates on Terra Pool, downtime at Helios, immersion, updates on how much Bitcoin we're holding. Maybe you can kinda wrap up with an answer about those. Sure. Terra Pool, as we mentioned in a recent operational update, we're evaluating, you know, how much hash rate we wanna put into Terra Pool in the future. We had a rough month in May. Haven't given any updates to shareholders or to the market since then, other than, it's, you know, something that we were involved with at inception and are continuing to evaluate how much, you know, we're gonna, again, how much hash rate we're gonna put into it. Downtime at Helios, I guess there was a question about that. We're happy with the way Helios is performing so far. You know, the team on the ground has done an incredible job getting machines into the fluid and getting them turned on. It's inspiring to go down there and watch them work, particularly in the summer when it's really hot. They continue to do an awesome job. Again, our ability to control kind of the machines and their, you know, how much power they're using and how much hash rate they're putting out, depending on environmental conditions, depending on you know, where things are at in terms of, you know, each individual machine, we're really happy with. Helios is great. In terms of immersion, again, I wouldn't wanna be mining any other way in Texas other than with immersion. It's a hot summer down there this year. I was there recently, you know, it was 100 degrees. Tom is there right now, he can attest that it's pretty warm out. You really wanna be able to control heat, and immersion is the best way to control heat. The fact that we're able to keep, you know, dust and debris and particulate matter out of the facility as well is really important. I'm happy with the way immersion's going. Obviously, we're gonna be putting some more, you know, numbers out with our June operational update, which is coming out next week. We'll also have, you know, a little bit more of a fulsome update on Helios and current operations there. That's great. Peter, Alex, Tom, thank you ever so much for your time this afternoon and for taking questions from investors. Thank you once again to everybody for their engagement this afternoon. Peter, I will shortly redirect investors to provide you with their feedback as usual, which I know is particularly important to you all at Argo Blockchain. Before doing so, I wonder if I may just, Peter, ask you for a few closing comments to wrap up with. Sure. Thanks a lot, Mark. Yeah. Listen, it's been an interesting year so far. Obviously, 2021 was an incredible year for miners. It was a banner year. 2022 is different. That's the thing about this space, is every year is different. Again, it doesn't change our long-term outlook and our long-term belief that if we continue to position the company in the right way, put it in the right place, then things are gonna work out for us. I think of it. I've used the term before as like, you know, like a rally car. A rally car race where you're just, you know. There's times where things are clear sailing and you're flying ahead, and there's times where the road gets a little challenging and you gotta go uphill. At that time, you know, this is the time where the wheat gets separated from the chaff. I think we're gonna see that in the next six months. I think there's gonna be, you know, some companies that are in harder places. We've seen that already a little bit. I feel like we're on the right road, on the right path and look forward to updating shareholders as we go. That's great. Peter, Alex, Tom, thank you once again for your time this afternoon. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as we'll now automatically redirect you for the opportunity to provide your feedback in order the management team can better understand your views and expectations. Take a few moments to complete, but I'm sure again, will be highly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of Argo Blockchain PLC, we'd like to thank you for attending today's Q&A session. Thank you and good afternoon to you all.